At a private media unveiling held on the sidelines of CeBIT, GIGABYTE disclosed its next-generation flagship motherboard, the Z87X-OC. Like most socket LGA1150 motherboards unveiled this week, this one is still under development, and the company is yet to finalize color-scheme and heatsinks for the PCH and VRM, so don't judge it by its looks just yet. The Z87X-OC is designed primarily for overclockers.

The LGA1150 socket is powered by an 8-phase VRM, which draws power from a combination of 4-pin ATX and 8-pin EPS, in addition to the board's 24-pin ATX connector. To stabilize the board's various power domains, you can optionally plug in a 6-pin PCIe power connector. The board gives overclockers a high degree of physical on-the-fly voltage control, and measurement points. One of the chipset's four USB 3.0 ports are wired out as a type-A port on-board, letting you install and run your Windows 7/8 installation off a USB 3.0 flash-drive.

The LGA1150 socket on the GIGABYTE Z87X-OC is wired to four DDR3 DIMM slots supporting up to 64 GB of dual-channel DDR3 memory, and three PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots (x16/NC/NC ; x8/NC/x8 ; x8/x4/x4). The bottommost long PCIe slot appears to be electrical Gen 2.0 x4, wired to the PCH. A PCI-Express 2.0 x1, and two legacy PCI slots find room in the middle.

Connectivity includes six SATA 6 Gb/s internal ports, a total of nine USB 3.0 ports (six of which are driven by third-party controllers), HDMI and DisplayPort display outputs, 8-channel HD audio, PS/2 mouse/keyboard combo, and gigabit Ethernet. We expect the Z87X-OC to be part of the company's first wave of LGA1150 motherboards. Find more pictures at the source.

Fixed. Those buttons are nice but they'll be useless once you put this mb into a case (which is mostly of us do).

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It's designed primarily for overclockers, some of which don't put their boards in a case.

If you put the board in a case, the buttons won't ruin it for you. But if you run it on a test bench to take a sub-zero 3Dmark record, you might want them, and Gigabyte wants people to do that so that you'll be impressed and buy the board.

I do notice that they've taken a roughly 75% hit in the VRM phase-count vs. the Z77 version of this board.

It's designed primarily for overclockers, some of which don't put their boards in a case.

If you put the board in a case, the buttons won't ruin it for you. But if you run it on a test bench to take a sub-zero 3Dmark record, you might want them, and Gigabyte wants people to do that so that you'll be impressed and buy the board.

I do notice that they've taken a roughly 75% hit in the VRM phase-count vs. the Z77 version of this board.

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Yes, I have noticed these boards are very cluttered together to begin with.

That's the one thing that is making me like Gigabyte more and more is their placement for that. Hell a lot easier to do than taking a card out of the slot.. Even more so when there is water involved.. But, like you said.. personal thoughts.

Looks very good and I like the layout my only complaint I have is like all the other M/B, has to many PCI if your going to have legacy slots at least leave it to just 1, the bottom PCI should be a PCI Express ×1 as the first one will get blocked and anyone using new card wont be able to use their PCI Express ×1 card.